"It seemed ironic that I would be experiencing culture shock in the country where I was born."
A Korean adoptee on returning to her birth country as an adult.

While writing about addressing this for my kids with frequent visits to Cambodia, another thought kept niggling.

I was born and raised in California. Although I traveled a good deal, California was in every way my home until I was almost forty-two-years old. I was born in Livermore, my schooling was in the Bay Area and Northern California, I had two kids that I raised to adulthood in the Central Valley, I worked, played and lived as a Californian ... a fourth-generation Californian, actually, and we're rather rare in the state ... for more than four decades.

And you know what happens when I go back now, a mere fourteen years later? I suffer a gigantic jolt of culture shock that takes at least a week to level out.

A couple of things are happening to bring this on.

First, my life is my life and I live it now on a little island in the Indian Ocean where we often have no onions or yogurt or fill in the blank with whatever you're really needing at the time that won't be anywhere to be had, where watching fruit bats do their hang-glider thing is considered entertainment, where the air and water are warm, and the attitude is too-cool-for-school.

Second, the world is changing fast.

A trip to The States always begins with me frozen with awe and indecision in a grocery store.

Choices. After a couple of years away, I don't know what to do with them. I'm immobilized, usually in either the aisle that is the mile-o'-coffee or the one where a gajillion different kinds of cereal demand I stop with the shilly-shallying and "pick me! pick me!".

(You should have seen me when after eight years away and almost forty hours of travel a check-out person asked, "Paper or plastic?" For the life of me I coudn't remember which was the right answer. THEN she wanted to know if I had a "Ralph's card". What the heck is a Ralph's card? I won't even go into the 'tap in the details' machines that completely threw me for a loop. See next paragraph ... )

Then there's the "GOLLY GEE WHIZ! LOOK AT THAT DOHICKY! WHAT'S IT DO?" embarrassment that I never seem to avoid, always over something my daughter or my brothers have taken for granted for so long that they immediately assume I've been posting my blogs over the coconut phone for the past year while Gilligan pedals for the power. I get a "join the world, why dontcha?" look, and if I'm lucky a brief description of the usefulness of the gizmo that apparently no one can now live without.

I may be back in a place where everyone looks like me, but fit? Not until I've had some decompression time.

If the culture of my birth, youth and bulk of my life can smack me in the face like a sack full of nickels after just a couple of years away, how can someone adopted as an infant and relocated to another country possibly feel anything but culture shock on a first-ever birth country trip?

Where does the expectation come from that some deep connection must be felt for what is in almost every aspect completely foreign soil the minute a returning adoptee steps off the plane?

Talk about a set-up!

Birth country visits are not about going home. Home is home, and just like my home now is Seychelles, an adoptee's home is wherever home is. Birth country visits are visits. They're opportunities to learn and begin to connect, not a final step in connecting.

Even kids like Sam and Cj who will grow up spending a lot of time in their birth country won't step off the plane and feel, "I'm home ...".

They'll have to figure out the money and where to catch a cab into town and how the toilets work and what a cup of coffee costs and if they should drink the water and which way to look when crossing the street and so on and so on and so on. Like me going back to the US or a diver rising from the deep, decompression time and space may be important if the trip is to be survived, much less enjoyed.